The Murakami Wine: Royal Tokaji Essencia 1993-2017

BY NEAL MARTIN | MARCH 18, 2025

To passengers on the 9:35 to Clapham Junction, I look like any other commuter engrossed in a hardback. They have no idea that my mind has been spirited away to an alternate reality created by Japan’s best-selling author, Haruki Murakami. My life has been signposted by his books since the mid-nineties, when I picked up a copy of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” in the famous Kinokuniya bookstore. I was hooked. I devoured every one of Murakami’s novels and eagerly awaited his next. Occasionally, I plant Murakami Easter eggs into my prose, a little homage. Having lived in Japan—its culture and blood intertwined with my own—his stories and characters have always resonated. Unlike Tolkien or Pratchett, Murakami’s fantasies exist just one shift away from reality, what has been dubbed magical realism. His protagonists, often male, lonely and drifting, traverse the liminal space between two worlds. You just have to open a particular door or chance upon a disused well to find yourself in a parallel universe.

An hour later, swirling a Tokaji Essencia from Royal Tokaji, I realise that this is a “Murakami wine.”

Technically, it is wine…but is it really?

Essencia’s sweetness should theoretically overwhelm the senses. Case in point, on this day, my liver contends with 5,049 g/L residual sugar by lunchtime. This sucrose tsunami is dispersed between just nine bottles, from the inaugural 1993 to newly released 2017, averaging around 560 g/L per wine. Vin de paille, Sauternes and Trockenbeerenauslese must banish notions of sweetness in Essencia’s presence. Defying rationality, its contrapuntal acidity prevents cloyingness and imparts a scintilla of bitterness. Unlike wine in the normal world, Essencia is not ideal if the goal is intoxication. Hovering around a meager 2% alcohol, you’d have to imbibe one of the 18 magnums produced by Royal Tokaji, and I cannot guarantee your survival if you attempt the vinous equivalent of BASE jumping. Furthermore, instead of a regular glass, Essencia’s unctuousness means it is preferably drunk with a glass spoon, not unlike medicine. Perhaps that is a more accurate description? Finally, like many Murakami novels, time moves at a different pace apropos Essencia, if at all. It is not indestructible like Madeira. There’s no protective jacket of oxidation. But akin to many sweet wines, there are yawning gaps between clocks’ ticks.

Translynvanian-born Head Winemaker Zoltán Kovács joined the company in 2017.

This vertical tasting is the first and probably the last of its kind, since just a handful of the first releases remain. Only 400 bottles of 1993 Essencia were ever produced. Sadly, Hugh Johnson, who co-founded Royal Tokaji with Peter Vinding-Diers, was unable to attend the tasting. But winemaker Zoltán Kovács flew over and explained that during the first years, Johnson and his team were figuring things out against the backdrop of a country rebuilding itself after the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc. Despite its long history and the rollcall of Tokaji aficionados from Catherine the Great to Napoleon III via Beethoven, Johnson et. al were in uncharted territory. Some considered Johnson’s venture mad, a quick way of losing a fortune. Nobody knew if climatic conditions would make a 6-Puttonyos possible, and both the 1991 and 1992 suggested it was indeed too inclement. When the 1993 season gifted fruit with sugar ripeness levels to achieve 5- or 6-Puttonyos, Johnson’s dream of producing Essencia became a reality.

The manner in which Essencia is created also comes from a parallel universe. The dehydrated Aszú berries that Kovács suggested ideally lose around 80% of their weight over three to six weeks then rest in racks for years…Drip, drip, drip of insanely concentrated free-run juice is collected intermittently and “matured” into glass demijohns. It’s like an artist who makes one tiny brushstroke, a composer pencilling one more note on a stave per day. The extraordinary high sugar levels impede alcoholic fermentation so that alcohol levels accrete imperceptibly. One takeaway from this tasting is that on the one occasion that alcohol did reach the dizzying height of 4.2%, it detracted from the Essencia, denuding it of character and complexity.

With respect to the 2017, the unprecedented generosity of Aszú berries allowed experimentation with used barrels. “The 2017 was a very generous vintage when producers could fill their cellar with Aszú wines,” Kovacs explains. “We bought in Aszú berries from other producers to supplement our own, so that we had 25 lots. Then, step-by-step, we selected a few to blend for the Essencia. We also made trials in used 500-liter barrels to see what it might contribute, and when the final blend was made, we decided to use these for one-third of the production. They lent richness and balance, the tannins and polyphenols.”

Upon request, the Essencias could be tasted either from glass or spoon. The wines’ unctuosity meant that it was actually more practical and enjoyable to use the latter.

I am curious about the marked difference in colour between the oldest three vintages— 1993, 1999 and 2000—compared to subsequent releases. There is no gradual colour degradation as you would expect. These three Essencias were conspicuously darker in hue. What explains this? Possibly a change in grape varieties that was partly governed by contracted fruit, a higher proportion of Zéta? Kovács also suggests a longer maceration time. Alas, records were not kept, so we will never know for sure. Recent vintages will naturally turn the same deeper colour in time, however, perhaps they will take longer to do so.

The tasting takes around an hour and a half. I have to hot-leg it early, due to rendezvous with a bunch of Burgundies. I take the train from Wandsworth Town rather than the cab, and waiting on the platform, I hear Dave Brubeck playing in a car somewhere nearby. I board the train and open my Murakami novel, “The City And Its Uncertain Walls.” One sentence reads: the tips of two different worlds were overlapping, ever so slightly.

The stray black cat sitting opposite tells me that the phrase is apposite with respect to my comparison of Essencia and regular wine.

I nod my approval.

 © 2025, Vinous. No portion of this article may be copied, shared or re-distributed without prior consent from Vinous. Doing so is not only a violation of our copyright, but also threatens the survival of independent wine criticism.

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